Resource Use Rights and Other Challenges to

In 1995, the Philippines officially adopted Community-Based Forest Management (CBFM) as its strategy for sustainable forest management in recognition of the urgent need to put “social fences” in open access forests and forest lands. CBFM was conceptualized to partly respond to the issue of the state as being the biggest “absentee landlord” by recognizing de-facto resource management of communities, including indigenous peoples (Hyde and others, 1996). Many foresters and environmentalists, expected communities in CBFM areas would initiate effective actions that would minimize negative upstream-downstream and on-site-off-site impacts of forest management externalities (Wallace, 1993). Tenure, resource use rights, and support systems to communities were assumed to trigger self-perpetuating sustainable forests and forest lands practices. These were supposed to be the key incentives that would “push” CBFM into the major landscape of forests and forest land management in the Philippines.